One of the most comprehensive and practical frameworks for container security is NIST SP 800-190 (Application Container Security Guide). Co-authored by Minimus founder and CTO, John Morello, this guide outlines a clear set of security controls purpose-built to address the evolving risks of containerized environments.
As government agencies accelerate cloud-native adoption, NIST SP 800-190 (Application Container Security Guide) remains a cornerstone for container and Kubernetes security. Co-authored by one of the founders of Minimus, the NIST SP 800-190 emphasizes actionable controls to mitigate the evolving risks inherent in containerized environments.
Even with excellent guidance like NIST SP 800-190 available, applying container security principles in practice can be difficult. Here are some of the most common hurdles that security and DevOps teams face:
Many organizations rely on bloated, general-purpose container images that include unnecessary packages, binaries, and tools. These larger images increase the attack surface and often contain dozens or even hundreds of known vulnerabilities. As these images proliferate across environments, they become harder to manage, patch, and secure—especially when developers build their own variations without a standardized baseline.
Building upon SP 800-190, compliance frameworks like Executive Order 14028 and FedRAMP increasingly require proof of software provenance and a complete software bill of materials (SBOM). But traditional container build systems weren't designed to generate verifiable SBOMs or support secure, reproducible builds. As a result, teams are left piecing together manual or third-party solutions that slow progress and introduce gaps in trust.
Many popular container security tools depend on internet access to fetch threat intelligence, scan images, or apply policy updates. But in today’s world, many critical workloads are kept in airgapped or restricted environments, causing those tools to break down or require significant re-engineering, leaving agencies with reduced visibility and delayed patching.
To meet compliance, many teams are forced to manually strip down images, apply security policies, or backport patches—creating brittle workflows and slowing the development cycle. These manual processes are hard to scale, error-prone, and often lead to inconsistent enforcement across environments.
Minimus was designed to address these challenges from the ground up, making it easy to go from policy to practice. Purpose-built to embody the principles covered in NIST SP 800-190, Minimus delivers a new category of container images that are minimal, verifiable, and operationally aligned with compliance needs across industries.
Beyond standard best practices, Minimus uniquely integrates real-time threat intelligence, automated action providers for remediation, and native support for self-hosted deployments, including in air-gapped or classified enclaves—a critical advantage for any team with sensitive workloads.
Here are five key benefits to using Minimus for NIST SP 800-190 compliance:
Every Minimus image is engineered with only the absolute essentials—eliminating shells, package managers, and latent binaries. This drastically reduces vulnerability exposure and aligns with 800-190’s principle of attack surface minimization.
Minimus continuously integrates curated threat intelligence from leading security sources and provides built-in action providers that surface remediation steps directly within CI/CD pipelines—accelerating detection and response in both pre-deployment and runtime phases.
All images are cryptographically signed, verifiably reproducible, and tracked from source to registry. This fulfills 800-190’s provenance control objectives and mitigates supply chain threats, such as dependency hijacking or image tampering.
Minimus images are designed for seamless deployment in air-gapped, disconnected, or classified environments, with full support for offline image mirroring, updates, and policy enforcement—critical for DoD, IC, and civilian agency use cases where cloud connectivity is limited or prohibited.
With built-in conformance to FedRAMP, DoD SRG, and CIS Benchmarks, Minimus images reduce compliance drift and help teams meet regulatory mandates without manual hardening.
Minimus helps security and development meet NIST guidance without excessive overhead. Native integrations with CI/CD tools, support for offline mirroring, and complete self-hosting options mean Minimus can operate securely and effectively in even the most constrained government environments.
NIST SP 800-190 calls for automation, traceability, and least privilege by default. Minimus delivers on that vision—not as an add-on, but as the foundation.
